It's about the feeling of ownership. Linux is free and open in every way. Linux belongs to everyone. Just using Linux makes one feel like part of the community. BSD, despite its license, is "owned" by small groups of control freaks with limited visions. They don't really want you to be a part of their group because you are inferior and you might mess up their code.

From what I read on the net, the new versions of the Linux kernel is indeed a mess.

barti, I suspect you are attempting to understand the different culture found in the *BSD world as opposed to what you saw in the Linux world, & you are trying to put all the inconsistencies together. You would be doing yourself a greater favor if you would try to organize your thoughts more carefully into a more discernible narrative before posting.

It would also help your readers try to understand what is most fundamentally important to you at this time.

True, but if Hurd or Minix had matured, that would've been the case as well. The whole point of Linus releasing Linux was to have a Unix-like system on the 386. Funny thing though is that today, Hurd isn't vaporware anymore and has incorporated a lot of drivers from the 2.6.32 Linux kernel. In fact, there was a statement last year from Debian about creating a Hurd release for Debian Wheezy. Minix in addition had a lot of utilities replaced with applications from NetBSD.

Hurd isn't vaporware anymore and has incorporated a lot of drivers from the 2.6.32 Linux kernel. In fact, there was a statement last year from Debian about creating a Hurd release for Debian Wheezy. Minix in addition had a lot of utilities replaced with applications from NetBSD.

Thats probably because both Hurd and Linux are GPL and both Minix and NetBSD use BSD license

__________________religions, worst damnation of mankind"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus TorvaldsLinux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.vermaden's:linksresourcesdeviantartspreadbsd

The HURD is just a big pile of fail. Even more than most other GNU projects.

Minix 3 actually looks quite nice. Unlike earlier Minix versions, it's not just a research system anymore but aimed to be a "real" desktop/server OS.
I'd like to explore it someday, but these days my computer playtime is pretty limited ...

I wonder...
And now, for sumtin' serious... I've read that Plan9 wasn't deployed world-wide, because it was ahead of it's times for like 30-40 years or so... What do You think about it?

I'd try switching to it if...
1. I was reasonably sure how to install it and that it would support my hardware.
2. I had a mouse that makes acme's chording comfortable
3. I knew for sure it ran firefox (or a suitable replacement), emacs (I'd need time to ween myself off emacs and onto acme), an X server (can it?), an RDP client, and various other software (it was also unclear to me whether it had any kind of C++ compiler beyond cfront, whether it ran any kind of Scheme compiler supporting more than R4RS or even scsh, whether it had sbcl or any other implementation of CL).

My impression was that the problem with plan 9 was that it needs a group of middling hackers outside the core group to do all the porting or new creation of programs that its creators turn their nose at (web browsing is the worst for keeping out new clean OS designs with all the crap we've come to need to use common sites and how much work that takes to support). Unless that happens it's like Oberon -- a prototype showing the way things maybe ought to be but lacking lots of stuff many of us are used to having. You can tell me all this other stuff is just sugar, fat, and salt, but probably that won't be enough to motivate me to do all my computing plan 9's way. If using OpenBSD meant I couldn't run anything beyond their base, I wouldn't use it either, as much as I like what they're doing.

Acme's pretty cool, though. Just need a better mouse.

Damn it, you're going to make me go on another plan9port or kick soon.

I tried plan 9 about a year or two ago. Performance wise I loved it, but the lack of ported software kept me from keeping the installation for more that 3 or 4 days.

But this post makes me want to try it again and maybe look into porting stuff to it.

__________________
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick

Wow... Imagine SteelBankCL on Plan9 on PrecisionBook 9000... Can You guys think of anything more hackerish?
Rollerblades grow themselves on your feets, young Jolie pops up on "faces" announcer... Halcyon on and on...

Lack of cpp compiler keeps me away from it. And, on the other hand, rio conception is something I really, really dont like - mouse driven WM, on which everything must be typed on keyboard... Kinda like a new ubuntu gui

I've read that Plan9 wasn't deployed world-wide, because it was ahead of it's times for like 30-40 years or so... What do You think about it?

It was primary a Research OS from Bell Labs.
System was developed in times where AT&T facilities were at 'split' mode. Bell Labs was reformed, and renamed to Lucent Technologies. The Tenth Edition Unix, was the last one.

And If I may say, Research versions were developed mainly to code purity, and mostly by a small amount of people.

If you take a UNIX system family tree, You see that only the Sixth [1975] and Seventh Edition [1978] made an 'impulse' for the creation of BSD and for USG-USDL - System III and V projects. And these distributions were developed in large - mostly University research centres around the US, they improved not only a kernel [mostly to port Unix for different architectures], but mainly developed the User-land space, with lots of useful programs. Like finger which first appeared in 2 BSD, and by which Robert T. Morris, using gap in finger buffer, succeed to spread his Worm, around the Net.

The Unix V8 code was merged with USDL System V Release 2, but not with 4.2 and 2.9 BSD's.

And the Ninth Edition was the last one that spread own code to distributions mainly to BSD. The Tenth Edition was the last one, that ENDED original system development, and was not implemented to any fame distribution.

The Unix successor Plan 9 came up in times, were the large communities where focused on free software development, mainly using predecessors ideas from Unix distribution like System V and BSD.

And as we know It today system without a community [which produce daily use standards] is mostly dead system.

Every program for the original PDP-7 Unix system was written in assembly language, and bare assembly language it was - for example, there were no macros.
Moreover, there was no loader or link-editor, so every program had to be complete in itself.

The first interesting language, as is mentioned by Dennis Ritchie, was a version of McClure's TMG that McIlroy implemented to PDP. [R. M. McClure, 'TMG--A Syntax-Directed Compiler,' Proc 20th ACM National Conf. 1968, pp. 262-74]

After TMG became available, Thomson decided that Unix could not pretend to offer a real computing service without Fortran, so he sat down to write a Fortran in TMG.

Instead, after a week of hard work, Thompson produced a definition of and a compiler for the new language. B language. There is a good article about it, that was written by S. C. Johnson and B. W. Kernighan, 'The Programming Language B,' Comp. Sci. Tech. Rep. #8, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ 1973.

B was much influenced by the BCPL language [ M. Richards, 'BCPL: A Tool for Compiler Writing and System Programming,' Proc. AFIPS SJCC 34 1969, pp. 557-66 ], other influences were Thompson's taste for 'spartan syntax', and the very small space into which the compiler had to fit.

The compiler produced simple interpretive code; although it and the programs it produced were rather slow, it made life much more pleasant.

The next step was made in 1971 when work began on what was to become the C language.
The story of the language developments from BCPL through B to C is told in D.M. Ritchie, S.C. Johnson, and M. E. Lesk, 'The C Programming Language,', Bell Sys. Tech. J., 57 No. 6 (July-August 1978), pp. 1991-2019

So I don't know is there any need to understand the root's of today's OS.
But we could talk. Anyway.

I don't know if there is a "need"...but I for one love this historical stuff, especially when the person posting was working in that time frame. When I was in college 20+ years ago and was studying C nowhere, that I recall, was B ever mentioned. It was only through *BSD forums that I learned this a few years ago.

Now you hit me with TMG! I'm definitely going to look for these books!

Thank you!

__________________
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick

I don't know if there is a "need"...but I for one love this historical stuff, especially when the person posting was working in that time frame. When I was in college 20+ years ago and was studying C nowhere, that I recall, was B ever mentioned. It was only through *BSD forums that I learned this a few years ago.

Now you hit me with TMG! I'm definitely going to look for these books!

Thank you!

I recommend to You articles from Bell System Technical Journal, v57: i6 July-August 1978; they all can be download on this site.

Especially the text that was firstly published in 1974 in Communications of the ACM, and then reprinted with upgrades in BSTJ 1978, The UNIX Time-sharing System, by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

__________________
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick